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278 Chapter 15
Not surprisingly, you use the width and height attributes to set the width and the height
of the video display area on the page, as shown in the following example:
The controls attribute determines whether a default set of playback controls should
be visible within the browser. This can be helpful and I recommend using it. In fact, if
you don’t use the controls attribute, the visitor has no way to replay the video without
reloading the entire page. How annoying! Here’s an example of the controls attribute:
The preload attribute tells the browser to begin downloading the video immediately
when the element is encountered. If the video is the central theme of the page, and it’s
likely that all (or most) visitors will want to watch the video, then it’s a good idea to use
the preload option. However, if the video element is a small part of the page and visitors
aren’t likely to watch it, then preloading the video is just a waste of bandwidth. Here’s the
preload attribute in action:
The loop attribute tells the browser to restart the video immediately when it’s finished
playing, as shown here:
Finally, the autoplay attribute makes the video automatically play when the page is
loaded. For most purposes, this is generally a bad idea from a usability standpoint. Most
users will want control over the video; they’ll play it when their attention is focused
and they’re ready to consume the video element. And even with the autoplay attribute
enabled, your visitors might have that option disabled in their browsers. For that reason,
along with the usability problem, I recommend not using the autoplay attribute with one
notable exception: if you don’t include the controls attribute, then you need to include
autoplay; otherwise, the video won’t play and visitors will have no way to start it. Here’s
an example of the autoplay attribute:
Putting it together, a real-world video element looks like this:
The preceding examples all work well if your visitors have a browser such as Firefox 3.5 or
later or Opera 10.5 or later. However, what if a visitor has Internet Explorer? In that case,
you’ll need to encode the video so that it can be played in Internet Explorer. The